Friday, March 30, 2012

I been working on a project I call the Lost Book of Magic. In the three years since I released Majestic Wilderlands I ran several campaigns using Swords & Wizardry. Along the way I further developed the rules and background I use to run magic in my setting. The Lost Book of Magic collects all that together much in the same way the Majestic Wilderlands collected my rulings and notes for the campaign as a whole.

One central chapter is the creation of magic items. The system is fairly system. Each item has a cost to create and takes X time. It is fairly expensive and takes enough that players think twice before making it themselves. It also serves as the foundation for the pricing of magic items. Being able to buy magic items has always been part of my campaigns.

I recently completed a rough draft of the chapter and formatted it. You can download it from here. I appreciate any comments. It is a synthesis of what I read in the AD&D DM's Guide, the Rules Cyclopedia, and the prices I developed from GURPS Magic. It currently limited to the list of magic items (and effects) found in the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.